Hi guys,

There are some games I'm trying to play which will only work on Windows 98 and will not run in a VM. I have an old P4 machine with a 250 GB hard drive which has drivers for and is able to run windows 98. I'm aware that Windows 98 has some issues with drives larger than 137 GB. I'm now running into MAJOR issues because of something to do with the partitioning of this drive, being that it's 250 GB.

Long story short, I was only able to get windows 98 to install successfully by having Fdisk manage the entire partition and create a 12 GB useable area for Win98. Using GParted to create a primary partition of 4GB with the Fat16 file system (boot/lba flags) would not work and cause LBA Scandisk errors as well as cause the setup to blue screen with a VFAT error message on reboot. I'm fine with the size that FDisk allocated for the partition, however, upon trying to install XP alongside Windows 98, I run into further issues. After the system reboots, I am not able to continue - it goes straight to a black screen with no cursor. Also, I can no longer boot from the Windows XP CD OR use the Windows XP recovery disk; I still get sent to the same black screen. I can still boot into Windows 98, however, by rapidly selecting it from the boot menu.

Looking through various websites, it appears this has something to do with the partition table, but I am unsure.

I'm not extremely familiar with partition tables or why this would happen. Did anyone have any ideas on what I could try or an alternate way to partition the drives / install the OSes so I can get these to install side by side? The way GPart shows the partitions after the installs is attached.

Thanks! 😀